Nick Dunhill's workbench - Scratchbuilding a Reid NBR Atlantic from an ACE Kit.

[Overseer]

You know what Fraser I spent ages a few years ago carefully separating the brass from the nickel silver. When I went to the local scrap merchants they weighed it and tipped it all into the same bin!

I was thinking more of giving it straight to the caster rather than a scrap merchant. It may be more of an issue in Australia than UK, here nickel silver availability is erratic and a friend found that using scrap sheet and etch waste worked really well when cast. One set of wheels I had cast were meant to be in nickel silver but they couldn't get any and substituted what they called white bronze - not sure what it actually is but it was incredibly tough to machine and wore lathe tools out very quickly.

 

[Nick Dunhill]

And here's a quick update of the progress on eccentric rods.

 

[Nick Dunhill]

The eccentric rods on the loco are very long, and the castings for this in the LGM inside motion kit are too short so, as you can see, I had to make some from waste etch. It's quite tricky to make the scarfed joints invisible, and you have to make sure the rods are straight and both ends square to each other. Some of the cross drillings in the castings were a bit diagonal, so they were soldered up and re drilled.

It takes a lot of effort but if you make everything and then carefully assemble and check each part eventually some nice running inside motion can be achieved.

Everything ran very nicely so I moved on to the brakes. Here are the brake parts that are in the kit, they are clearly for something else, or just random parts. The holes in the chassis for the brake hanger pivots are in completely the wrong place. They had to be filled and redrilled.

It's a bit of a recurring theme in this build, and becoming a bit less amusing every day as the bill racks up. Luckily I had some cast WM brake shoes in my bit box that are very close and I made the rest from scrap and left-overs.

The brake system is quite complex on this loco so I'll finish the rest tomorrow. There's not even any castings for brake cylinders in this kit even though they're very prominent. We'll be scratchbuilding again no doubt.

 

[Eastsidepilot]

It's a bit of a recurring theme in this build, and becoming a bit less amusing every day as the bill wracks up.

Nice work on the valve gear Nick

 

[spikey faz]

Nick, this is another inspirational build. Nice one for taking it on and persevering with it. If it's anything like my current build the cost of the additional parts possibly outweighs the cost of the original kit! Quite scary how the amounts can add up.

Mike

 

[Nick Dunhill]

This week I have been mainly making brakes. I made a pair of brake cylinders from some left overs in my box-o'-bits. I rummaged through the brass scrap box and found some left-over pull rods from an Agenoria Kit that were exactly the right size and so could be repurposed. I made sets of levers and bell cranks etc and fitted it all up.

I had got some springs and hangers printed by Mick Davies, and here they are fitted up on the finished chassis.

Here's the chassis stripped for a good wash.

The locos had Westinghouse brakes so there's a few air tanks on the loco and tender. Here's how I make them.

The K&S range of brass tubes all telescope inside the next size. I pick the tube with the closest OD and cut the required length, and a length from the next size down 2 mm shorter.

I close the ends of the smaller diameter tube by soldering it to a bit of scrap brass and cutting/filing to shape. You can see I drilled a hole on it to stop the end popping off when it gets hot.

Then I pop one inside the other and solder it up centrally with low melt solder.

Attention turned to the tender. Graham had already built a lot of it already, and it was well built so I test fitted the wheels to see if everything sat well.

Enough end float for you sir?

Of course I had to jack up the body by 1.2 mm as I had with the loco footplate. Now that the footplates of loco and tender coincided I reversed the top hat bearings and shimmed out the tender wheels. There were some brake blocks and hangers that vaguely resembled the correct type in the box, so I modified them so they were like the prototype. The rods for the hangers were not in the right place so had to be cut away, chassis re drilled and new rods fitted. The rest of the brake system is scratchbuilt as per loco.

This is the resulting chassis prior to the blobs of solder being removed!

Next week I hope to finish the upperworks of the tender, however a big issue has arisen. The model depicts the loco in it's earliest condition. Robin contacted me to explain that in their early days the tank sides were about 5 inches shorter than in later years. Graham built the tender in it's later condition so the first job will be to remove the flares (you should have never been wearing them in the first place!) and chop a few millimetres off the top of the tender sides. That's going to be fun.

Here's the cut line.

Incidently I'd like to hear from anyone who has (attempted to!) built the ACE Kit GCR Jersey Lilley. As I said above the chassis in this kit is from his Jersey Lilley kit with a few random etches that fail miserably to make it fit a Reid Atlantic. It would be interesting to see if the ACE Jersey Lilley chassis actually fit his Jersey Lilley body (assuming that's buildable.)

 

[Eastsidepilot]

It would be interesting to see if the ACE Jersey Lilley chassis actually fit his Jersey Lilley body (assuming that's buildable.)

Nick, your the only guy I know that has had any dealings with it......

 

[Arun Sharma]

I was thinking more of giving it straight to the caster rather than a scrap merchant. It may be more of an issue in Australia than UK, here nickel silver availability is erratic and a friend found that using scrap sheet and etch waste worked really well when cast. One set of wheels I had cast were meant to be in nickel silver but they couldn't get any and substituted what they called white bronze - not sure what it actually is but it was incredibly tough to machine and wore lathe tools out very quickly.

Interesting - I took a whole load of scrap etch NS and Brass to the foundry I use in the Jewellry Quarter in Birmingham and they tried casting from it. Generally unsucessful as it was considered 'too hard' which I understood to mean that its surface tension when molten was too high to allow it to flow into the smallest spaces. I assume that there are additives that allow molten brass to flow more easily but that seemed not an option with this scrap etch. Henceforth the scrap will go to local scrap merchants.

 

[Eastsidepilot]

I've always understood that the content of sheet brass to be roughly 66% copper to 34% zinc whilst that used for casting contains a small percentage of tin and iron ?.
For milling, CZ120, has an element of lead which is ideal, so may be the etching stuff isn't ideal for casting ?

Sorry Nick, diverting from your thread, your making a grand job on this build mate. The customer, who's example I built some years back sadly passed away a couple of years ago and I asked the family if they wanted to sell it but they didn't reply to my contact message.

 

[Nick Dunhill]

Today I replaced the weedy tender valance with one of the correct size and no integral step plate, I'll come back to those later. A quick grumble about tab and slot construction, filling the slots that appear on the top of (eg) footplates is a nightmare. Can they be half etched?

Really today was all about putting on my big-boy's pants and cutting off the top of the tender.

I laid waste to 6 slitting discs as Graham had doubled up the material on the tender side to get a strong join.

More awkward soldering next week, there's loads of beading.........

 

[mickoo]

Today I replaced the weedy tender valance with one of the correct size and no integral step plate, I'll come back to those later. A quick grumble about tab and slot construction, filling the slots that appear on the top of (eg) footplates is a nightmare. Can they be half etched?

The best way is an inner core with slot and tab fixing to get it nice and square then a solid skin on the outside with a flat butt joint base.

It takes twice as long to build and uses twice the real estate on the etch, but takes nearly zero time to clean up and give a perfect joint.

See my MR Compound tender....yes yes yes I know, I have the engine to do too

 

[Nick Dunhill]

Problem is often wide slots and narrow tabs next to a cab side or tender tank. You can't locate the part accurately anyway and end up with an awkward hole to fill.....and the solder wicks away onto the valence as well and needs more cleaning up

 

[Nick Dunhill]

Yes go and get on with the CAD....

 

[mickoo]

Problem is often wide slots and narrow tabs next to a cab side or tender tank. You can't locate the part accurately anyway and end up with an awkward hole to fill.....and the solder wicks away onto the valence as well and needs more cleaning up

I am well aware of the problem

There are lots of ways around it but the fundamental problem is you're fudging the etchers not doing their job correctly, they're just too slapadash with their tolerances, which makes etching kits bloody hard work. Sometime they're tight, sometimes perfect, but more often as not they over cook and leave sloppy joints.

 

[mickoo]

Yes go and get on with the CAD.....

The big elephant has now gone.....this smaller one won't take as long

 

[Eastsidepilot]

Un-wanted slots are best filled with brass wire, soldered and filed .....that's if you ain't binned it first

 

[Nick Dunhill]

So this week began with rebuilding the tender having taken a slice out of it. I reattached the diagonal flares and fashioned some corner pieces. The corner pieces were made out of the jigs for setting the angles of the flares. I just mucked about folding and cutting until I got someting that fitted the gap and had the correct curvature. The first one took a while but the second was easy! The next job was to reattach the tender top and make good. I also added beading round the top edge of the flares and down the front. This was bent from half round 1 x 0.5 mm rod. There's also a thin strip that goes round the top of the tender sides along the bottom of the flare. I found an undersized boiler band in the bit-box for that.

There were no parts in the box for the beading, and the etches for the division plates at the front and rear were comically wrong but at least they were too big so could be repurposed.

You can see that I have also added the coal rails. The kit parts reside in my scrap box together with all the parts for steps and treads. All the wrong shape and/or size, and there were no backing plates for the cab steps. The coal rails are attached to uprights made from scrap and are bent from half round with the same dimensions as above. They're quite tricky to get right, but I used 1.2 mm rods and drills as spacers to get them all parallel.

The designer played a trick of the eye with the steps on the front of the tender and beneith the cab (loco designer that is, the kit designer didn't even bother with most of the parts!) The tender footplate and body is significantly narrower than those of the cab. The step backing plates are subtly different such that the treads of both co-incide. This took a lot of working out and scratchbuilding.

Another job this week involved filling the pre etched handrail holes for the tender and redrilling new ones. I added the handrails for good measure too. The next bit then involved filling the pre etched handrail holes in the cab and redrilling for new ones also in the correct place.

These are the tender sand boxes I quicky made earlier. There were no etches for these in the kit and, surprise surprise, the tender decking was the wrong size and shape!

Now maybe I'm being a bit over critical here but, surely, if you're drawing a rectangle and you have got out your best pen, set square and ruler you might as well draw the rectangle the correct size? That way the interconnecting rectangle will fit nicely too, and the dimensions are all there on the drawing. The kit might as well have been a box of sticking plasters and fishing weights, at least they'd have been useful.

The scrap bin gets fuller and fuller. Anyone wanting to see more of the horror show can have a peep from behind the settee here;

nick dunhill

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[Eastsidepilot]

I think the kit 'designer' ? used a sketch on the back of a fag packet

Ace Products build quality Locomotive Trains Trains and Kits. Our Mission statement – “Is to endeavour to make 0 Gauge affordable to everyone who wants to model locomotives, and to scale models accurate in dimension and including all external details.
We have been building and supplying Model Railway trains and Kits for over 20 years, with a high reputation for producing quality engineered trains."

Definitely something wrong with that statement !

 

[AJC]

It does say what sort of quality, or well engineered. And, on this evidence, that’s probably just as well.

Adam

 

[simond]

I guess I don’t care if someone wants to produce a crap kit, I probably won’t buy it, or if I do, I would do so hopefully in full knowledge of its shortcomings.

but the trouble with “affordable“ kits is that if they’re crap, some poor beginner will have splashed out on it not knowing that unless (s)he possesses prodigious but unknown talent, it’s going to end in tears, or the bin, or both.

and that could so easily spoil the hobby for the rest of said beginner’s life as they will assume it’s their fault, rather than laying the blame where it lies. Some publications and some websites are notably incapable, or dead scared, of calling a heap of dodoos what it is, and I think that’s very bad for the hobby. And I do care about that.